The Urban Fantasy Anthology (27 page)

Those three words parting the only lips I wanted to kiss. And Shari not even looking at me when she said them, afraid that I’d see her doubts hiding in her eyes.

My girl, sitting there in a boosted Ford parked in her favorite place in the world, trembling, like she’d rather be somewhere else.
Anywhere
else. And who could blame her? Christ, with the things she’d discovered that summer, she could have had anyone. Sticking with me was just crazy, just—

Unsure, I reached out, my hand barely brushing her bare shoulder, traveling that delicate ridge of collarbone, exploring her slender and perfect neck. My fingers drifted through her hair, my movements surer now—I gotta admit it did something to me, just like always. I found her chin and gently turned her head in my direction, brushing that midnight hair over one shoulder.

There were those beautiful eyes of hers, alive with mysteries she could never share. Those full lips, containing all those secrets that she would never speak. Like I said, it did something to me. Just like always. I moved in to kiss her, and she didn’t move away. It didn’t start out like much of a kiss, but it shook me up the way I hoped it would.

When it was over, I really had the itch. I wanted her more than ever.

One look, and I knew that she felt the same way. A tear ran down one smooth marble cheek. I wiped it away, and it smeared on my callused fingers, and I found myself wishing that I could crush it in my fist.

She said, “I just want everything to stay the way it is.”

“Don’t worry, little darlin’,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I was. “Tonight it’s you and me. Just like it’s been all summer, ever since you and me became an
us.
Those jerks are in for a big surprise.” I slipped one hand around the back of her neck, but not in a rough way, and with the other I twisted the rearview in her direction. “Just look at you, Shari. You’re not the same girl you were when school let out.”

Shari stared at her reflection. She didn’t blink once, and a shiver rocketed over my spine like someone was stepping on my grave.

“No,” she said finally. “I’m not the same person. This place…and you…you’ve given me so much, Johnny.”

She pushed the mirror away, looking at the cemetery through the mosaic of kamikaze bugs plastered to the old Ford’s wind shield. Low fog bathed the ring of tombstones where she’d danced a couple of nights back with nothing covering that beautiful marble skin of hers but the blood of a black cat. I wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay, but I could see that she was spooked, just as spooked as the first time she visited the cemetery. That was back when she was just a scared kid in hand-me-downs who’d been broken by other kids because she couldn’t bear to look anyone in the eye, before the black dress and the red lipstick, before I took to parking boosted cars in the long shadows between two jagged mausoleums, before all the secret kisses and all the things that went with them.

So much had passed between us that summer. We’d made a world of our own, and no one else knew anything about it. But with school ready to start up, our world was going to change. We’d have to face those other people again. I thought I had it all figured out. But with Shari so rattled and uncertain, I couldn’t help but worry.

Her voice trembled. “Sometimes…this summer…” she began. “It just doesn’t seem real. I keep thinking I’ll wake up and it will have all been a dream. I keep thinking that maybe I’m imagining you…. I always had a crush on you, y’know? And I keep thinking that I’ll wake up, and I’ll be back in school with all those people, and you’ll be here….”

I nodded. She took my hand then, her fingernails digging into my palm like little knives. I couldn’t help but shiver; she couldn’t seem to let go. Her face had disappeared in the darkness—there was just a little razor cut of a moon in the sky, and the night was coming on hard, clouds blanketing the stars.

“I keep staring at that moon,” she said. “I keep thinking that it looks like a sickle.”

She couldn’t stop shaking. “I’m afraid the moon’s going to slice down out of the sky, Johnny,” she said, her fingers locked in mine. “I’m afraid it’s going to cut us to pieces.”

The carhop’s roller skates made an icy little rumbling sound as she drifted across the parking lot, away from the stolen Ford.

When she was out of sight, I lifted the Coke off of the little metal tray and handed it to Shari. Then I reached under the seat and found the cardboard box. Inside was a Revell model kit that I’d swiped from a hobby shop in Fresno the same night I boosted the Ford. I slipped the lid off of the box, revealing a miniature ’48 Chevy.

“Wow.” Shari smiled. “It looks just like it.”

“Yeah, I’m a real artist.” I wasn’t bragging. I’d done a good job. Customized it just right. Two-tone paint-job—turquoise and black. Every detail reproduced, right down to the miniature tornado swirling on the hood.

I handed the model to Shari, then rummaged through the unused parts in the bottom of the box until I found the decal sheet. I traded her the sheet for the Coke. She ran her fingers over the decals, whispering a few words.

I knew better than to listen. Instead I stared between a couple of dead moths splattered on the windshield, studying a turquoise-and-black ’48 Chevy parked over by the bowling alley.

Shari dipped the decal sheet into the Coke. She let it sit for a minute, until the decals started to drift away from the backing.

There were two license plate decals. She attached one of them to a blank plastic plate glued to the trunk of the model.

The other floated on the surface of a Coca-Cola ice-floe. Shari stared down at it as she took the glass from my hand, then glanced over at the Chevy parked by the bowling alley.

“You promise not to blink, right?” she asked. “I mean, you’re not going to get distracted by a carhop who’s a dead ringer for Anita Ekberg or anything, are you?”

When the girl you love asks you something like that, you’ve got to laugh. “Baby, I’m just like The Flamingos,” I said, and then I sang the rest of it—
“I only have eyes for you.”

Shari hustled on over there. My ears were treated to the sweet little staccato rhythm of her high heels on blacktop, but my eyes got the better part of the deal when she bent low behind the ’48, her tight dress riding up over firm thighs.

The fingers of one hand dipped into the Coke. Then she reached out, kind of tenderly, the way she sometimes did when she ran a finger over my lips. But her finger only traveled the length of the Chevy’s license plate, leaving behind a decal from a Revell model kit.

And then the two of them showed up, right on cue. Slammed out of the bowling alley like they owned the world, swaggered across the parking lot.

Shari barely had a chance to straighten up. They both saw her at the same time, saw that black dress hiked up to the limit, that red lipstick, saw everything through a testosterone haze.

Nick Bradley was the smarter of the two. He got his mouth open first, saying, “You like the ride, huh, honey? You maybe wanna go for a ride?”

“Course she wants to go for a ride.” Marty Hyde’s brain had finally kicked into gear. “But it’s
my
ride, and I got the keys and the master switch.” Marty jingled his car keys as punctuation, shoving Nick with one shoulder, Nick stumbling in spite of himself. “We don’t have to make it a party,” Marty added. “Unless you want it that way, angel.”

Shari looked both of them dead in the eye. She refused to blink, and they… well, I’m sure the idiots wanted to blink, but they just
couldn’t.

Nick caught Shari’s thought-wave first. He laughed, shaking his head. “Naw,” he said.
“Naw!
It can’t be!”

Marty caught up. “Sharon? Sharon Heep? Is that really you?”

Shari’s eyes were daggers now. The corners of her mouth were playing with a smile, but just playing. And then she batted her eyelashes—a wicked twitch. Stirred the straw in the Coke and took a dainty sip….

“It is her!” Nick slapped Marty on the back. “It
is
the Heepster! Jesus, Marty, it looks like old Sharon’s been to charm school this summer!”

“Slut school,
more like it,” Marty replied, ever the quick wit. “Hey, c’mon Sharon. Let’s go for a ride, just the three of us. Let’s see what you’ve learned this summer.”

I said, “You guys got room for one more?”

Nick and Marty whirled. They hadn’t heard me coming.

Once again, Nick caught on first. “Johnny!” He gasped, a look of horror crossing his face. “No…it can’t be—”

Marty cut in with the clincher: “Christ, Johnny…you’re dead!”

I nodded, flicking open the switchblade that Nick had buried in my guts back in June.

They froze—eyeballing the knife, their faces pasty-white—so I decided to help them out. “Let me steer you fellas in the right direction,” I offered. “This is the part where you’re supposed to run for your lives.”

“Don’t confuse them, Johnny,” Shari said. “Don’t be so literal.”

“Sorry, fellas.” I snapped the blade closed. “I mean, you don’t have to
run
run—you can take the car.”

Nick and Marty just stood there, staring at us as we returned to the Ford.

“Man, can you believe that they’re so stupid?” I said.

Shari took my hand. “Believe it, Daddy-o.”

Behind us, the Chevy’s engine finally rumbled alive.

Four new tires burned rubber.

Nick and Marty were gone.

Pretty soon, they’d be the
gonest.

“What was that junk you put in the Coke?” the carhop wanted to know.

Shari laughed. I didn’t do a very good job of keeping a straight face, myself. But I did manage to set the model car on the serving tray.

“Decals,” Shari explained between giggles.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re a couple of hobbyists. We get together and build model cars. I guess we got a little sloppy tonight.”

“It could have been worse.” Shari’s voice was suddenly real serious. “I mean, we could have gotten glue all over the French fries, or paint in the cheeseburgers, or something.”

The carhop didn’t seem to catch on. She frowned as she set a fresh Coke next to the model car. “Well, just don’t do it again. Those darn
what-cha-ma-call-ems
are stuck to the glass. I bet it’s going to take a razor blade to get ’em off. I mean, only a
gomer
would want to drink
Coke
out of a glass that says
Chevy.”

“Sorry,” Shari said, and deep down I’ll bet she really was sorry for putting the carhop to all that trouble.

The carhop skated away. We dug into our cheeseburgers, which hadn’t even had a chance to get cold. Shari said, “I didn’t think I’d ever want to eat again.”

“You were really nervous, huh?”

“Are you kidding?” She swallowed another bite. “And it isn’t like we’re out of the woods yet.”

“Sure it is.”

She sighed. “C’mon, Johnny. We still have to go back to school. We still have to face everyone else.”

“So what?”

“I mean, all the stories and everything….”

I shook my head. “It’s like I said: This one little step, and it’s all over. Nick and Marty were the biggest, toughest monkeys in that damn zoo. With them gone, it’ll be easy.”

“But what about you? Nick and Marty talked, y’know. I mean, I never would have found your grave if I hadn’t listened to all the stories that were going around. And there’ll be lots of questions when you show up again. Think about it, Johnny. You’re going to have to explain things. Your parents are going to want to know what happened—”

“Those rummies?” My lips twisted into a smirk. “They’ll be sorry to see me walk through the door. My old man will worry that I’ll cut into the beer budget or something. Maybe I’ll just stay in the boneyard. It’s gotten so I kind of like it there.”

“But everyone else—”

“Screw everyone else. Screw their questions. Who’s gonna have the guts to ask ’em, anyhow? Who’s gonna come up to a guy who’s supposed to be dead and buried in an unmarked grave in the old cemetery…especially when the studs who supposedly gutted him and put him six feet under turn up dead? Who’s gonna say a thing to that guy when he comes waltzing into school with a girl on his arm?”

Shari nodded. “Not just any girl. A
freak
who believed in ghosts and witches and things that go bump in the night.
A freak
who everyone laughed at.” She took my hand. “Until she found someone who taught her to believe in herself.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you had to dig me up to do it.”

“Sometimes you have to be real desperate before you can really believe.” She kissed me, a sweet schoolgirl peck on the cheek. “And, anyway,” she added slyly, “some things are worth a little digging, y’know?”

We finished the cheeseburgers and drove back to the old cemetery, parking the stolen Ford between the same two broken-down mausoleums. Like I said, there was barely enough room to get one door open, so we both slipped out the driver’s side. I left the radio on, because Dinah Washington was singing “My Man’s an Undertaker.” Somehow, it seemed appropriate.

There was a marble slab a few feet off. Spider-webbed with cracks, but pretty much level. I set the Chevy model on top of it. “I wonder where they are,” Shari said.

“Let’s find out.” I knelt down, put my ear to the plastic hardtop and listened for a couple minutes while Shari paced back and forth between two granite tombstones.

“No clue where they are,” I said finally, “but you should hear the idiots yelling at each other.” I stood up, shaking my head, and winked at Shari. “I can’t figure out what surprised them more—that I’d come back from the dead, or that you’d turned into such a dead solid knock-out.”

“Real funny, Johnny.”

“Yeah.” I sat on the slab. “Sorry. But I gotta tell you, Shari—your legs really made an impression on them.”

“Why, Johnny Benteen, you’re such a card.” She laughed. “I never would have guessed that a dead guy could possess such a lively sense of humor.”

“Ouch. Score one for the sexpot sorceress.”

“This is so weird.”

“The weirdest.”